Which Jesus?

Both the conservatives and the progressives seem to me to be full of the same kind of intolerance, arrogance, empty-headedness, and to be dominated by different kinds of conformism: in either case the dread of being left out of their reference groups.

--Thomas Merton

The Empire of Modernity tolerates and encourages two different false pictures of Jesus.  To make this point, I broadly reduce these to "red" and "blue" admittedly hyperbolic caricatures.  But most American Christians lean towards one of these two poles.    

1.  The Red "Jesus"

     

In my experience many Christians who loudly proclaim that they rigidly stick to the Bible, nevertheless often project a wildly unbiblical "Jesus" who functions as a mascot for the worst impulses of Empire.  He haunts the imagination of many Christians raised within the old Christendom model.  The most extreme versions show a gun-toting, white nationalist "Jesus" with predictably blue eyes and long blonde hair, who hates LGBTQ people, immigrants, the poor, Blacks, Muslims, and Jews -- but somehow also loves the Israelis.  The January 6 insurrectionists invoked this "Jesus," as did the KKK before them.  We call them White Christian Nationalists.  

Even if they don't go for that explicit picture, many still see a "Jesus" who supports Capitalism, militarism, colonialism, patriarchy, and a return to the traditional morality of the 1950's.  He advocates, or at least tolerates or even disregards, the wanton exploitation of natural resources, especially fossil fuels, therefore denying and exacerbating the climate crisis.  He justifies self-righteous violence, lying, theft, bullying, and brutality done in his name, especially by law enforcement or the military.  He seems to need us to protect him.  The Positive Thinking/Prosperity Gospel rendition of this "Jesus" transactionally blesses his followers with material wealth and rewards the strong willed.  

This version of "Jesus" exists mainly to separate and differentiate the "saved" from everyone else.  His disciples seem to have a deep concern that hell be fully populated; at any rate, they enthusiastically threaten hell as a consequence of behavior they deem bad.  Their Jesus died only for the sins of those who believe in him, who often call themselves "born again."  This apparently licenses them to sin further without consequence.  His death placated the offended honor of an angry heavenly Father, whose wrath may yet be unleashed on America unless it keeps feeding Him the blood of weak and poor people to maintain the Empire's social order.  Many believe he will shortly "rapture" them all up into a heavenly paradise, allowing everyone else and creation itself to fall into painful horrors, while they watch from afar.  Until then, their "Jesus" serves mainly to hand out to very few worthy believers tickets to an afterlife in heaven.

Sadly, many Christians only know this perverse and false "Jesus," and they assume/demand that all Christians relate only to him.  When some come to realize the damage this all does, to themselves, others, and the earth, not to mention its wild distortion of the Jesus to whom Scripture attests, they understandably flee.  In the process they also too often either reject Christianity altogether, or seek (or invent) a less toxic "Jesus."         

2.  The Blue "Jesus"

On the left we have a very different "Jesus."  If the red one was about grief, fear, and anger, craving power, stability, and security, and valorizing the past, the blue "Jesus" exists mainly to gratify our desires and point us towards a glorious future here on earth.  These Christians believe in reason and progress.  They want to "build the Kingdom of God" here and now.  If red believers work their own theological contortions to render Jesus' uncomfortable teachings inert, the blue people place the Jesus of the New Testament under the knife of scientific, historical-critical vivisection.  This gives them a more sophisticated way to rationalize ignoring and dismissing the parts of the scriptural witness that do not fit their preconceived ideology and preference.  

Thus the blues as well have produced a "Jesus" that looks like them: a cynical teacher who wandered around Palestine making wry comments on the one hand mystifyingly esoteric and on the other advocating revolutionary social change, in the end unwittingly getting himself crucified by Rome.  He, of course, did not make any claim to deity, and his tragic death had no purpose beyond identification with others similarly maltreated.  He worked no supernatural healings or miracles, much less exorcisms.  He did not talk about Satan, or angels, or demons, or of the end of the world.  He certainly did not rise from the dead except in the most metaphorical, symbolic, and psychological sense.  The blue "Jesus" required nothing of his followers except that they do what they want and be themselves. 

Blue "Jesus" was "spiritual but not religious," and actively opposed establishment institutions and traditions.  He looked, talked, and acted like a 1960's hippie: an airy, vague, new agey guru (who probably did a lot of weed and shacked up with Mary Magdalene).  Unfortunately, his followers (the worst being Paul) quickly established the oppressive institutional Church which perverted and distorted his teachings, in the process violently stomping out innocent and gentle flower-children like the Gnostics and other so-called heretics, who were way more like Jesus than the nasty men who constructed the New Testament.  

Neither "Jesus" comes very close to the Jesus Christ to which the New Testament attests.  Rather, they each package and sell a "Jesus" which protects the interests, values, biases, desires, fears, and fantasies of those inventing, sustaining, and projecting him.  Both of them ignore and/or mangle aspects of the New Testament text in order to extract a "Jesus" who gets them to their goals and justifies whatever their prior psychological, political, economic, and social commitments demand.  And both represent ways of thinking pushed by Empire/Modernity.  Like sports teams, they look adversarial, but they play the same game according to the same rules.  No matter who happens to win, it is always merely "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" (Pete Townsend).

Red Christians want to block undeserving people from coming to the table, while blue Christians want to allow everyone equal access to the table... but both relate to Empire's table, in the sense of investing in Modernity's values, habits, assumptions, and ways of thinking.    

3.  Full-Spectrum Jesus Christ, Attested in Scripture.

The Jesus of the New Testament, however, overturns Empire's table, and proclaims a different Table altogether.  This Jesus challenges, undercuts, and existentially threatens the authority of Empire, offering an alternative commonwealth he calls "the Kingdom of God."  We cannot domesticate, co-opt, neutralize, tame, or even conclusively define this Jesus.  At any point Jesus may strike us with some word or action that does not compute according to our ideology and way of thinking, and even contradicts it.  Jesus offends both the right and left sides of Modernity's binary framing.

We see this, for instance, in the two groups of people Jesus took heat for associating with: prostitutes and tax collectors.  Accepting prostitutes rankled people concerned with preserving conventional morality.  And reaching out to tax collectors annoyed those interested in conventional ways of resisting the establishment.  We also see it in the fact that Jesus' antagonists ranged across the political spectrum from the collaborationist Sadducees, to the more populist Pharisees, to the revolutionary Zealots.  

The Jesus Christ to whom Scripture attests understands his mission as one of liberating the creation and human life from submission to malevolent supernatural, and earthly political/economic, influences that cause injustice, disease, possession, and death.  Jesus readily talks about angels, demons, and Satan as significant powers in human existence.  Jesus presents a rather high bar of redemption, saying things like "Many are called but few are chosen," and talks about an eternal life beyond the death of our physical bodies.  Jesus insists on the seriousness of our moral decisions and actions, insisting that we will all receive the consequences of our complicity in evil, which may include rendition to a place of spiritual retribution. 

Jesus teaches and calls disciples to a life of nonviolence, humility, equity, sharing, gratitude, forgiveness, and fearless joy.  Jesus includes in his circle a radically wide spectrum of humanity, welcoming those excluded, silenced, judged, and condemned by the religious and political/economic establishment.  This Jesus directly alleviates the suffering of people in their bodily, temporal existence, and offers to all an inextinguishable life of union with and in the Creator and all.  

Where red Christians manage to reduce morality mainly to the personal, private, and sexual, Jesus talks mostly about the pursuit of money, fame, and power, and targets mainly the rich and religious hypocrites.  He thus has a radically anti-establishment, anti-Empire mission.  

Jesus challenges everyone by insisting, against Modernity generally, upon the necessity that we renounce the rule of ego in order allow his own Presence, to emerge with, within, and among us.  This will necessarily entail suffering.  Jesus himself instructs his disciples to take up their own "cross" and follow him.  His death on a Roman cross shows his resistance to Empire, and his resurrection thereafter reveals Empire's powerlessness against his work.  Jesus inspires and gathers a community of followers who witness to, anticipate, and exemplify the Creator's emerging Reign of shalom.  Jesus foresees the ongoing violent collapse of the Empire and the simultaneous emergence of the Creator's Reign among all.

The Church will always find it challenging to have this Jesus Christ as its only Sovereign in life and in death.  But it only lives by, in, and for him.  Our entire life means discerning, embracing, and following God's will.  We need systems and processes that empower us to do this.  And that will not happen until we let go of Modernity's rules and criteria, and let go of Modernity's false Jesuses -- red and blue.

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Gelassenheit.

The idea that the world and everyone/everything in it exists as mere inanimate objects for humans to exploit, consume, transform, or otherwise wield power over and mangle for our own self-serving, arbitrary purposes, strikes me as perhaps the central ideology of Modernity.

One of the worst characteristics of Modernity centers on its maniacal obsession about messing with stuff.  The 16th century Enlightenment pioneer, Francis Bacon, vividly and nauseatingly described the scientific quest as strapping nature on a table and torturing her secrets out of her.  (Bacon himself actually used such techniques against women as a professional hunter of witches, which tells us everything we need to know about his character and the character of the movement he helped promote.)  In his enthusiasm for the application of violence against a nature imagined in feminine terms, Bacon set in place one of the main pillars of Modernity.  He prefigures Doctors J. Marion Sims and Josef Mengele in epitomizing Modernity's advocacy of careless and cruel violence towards living bodies of any kind.  

Modernity inherently wants to deconstruct, demolish, analyze, reduce to component parts, and otherwise apply violence to things, ostensibly in the pursuit of progress, knowledge, and profit.  We readily destroy villages in order to "save" them, in the words of one American officer in Vietnam.  We think nothing of reducing a mountain to rubble in order to extract the coal from within it.  We will casually cut down 2500 year old trees to make picnic tables and toilet paper, and destroy natural habitats with complete unawareness of the damage we do to other life forms.  We have inflicted this kind of violence upon the entire planet: corrupting the whole atmosphere to enrich a few men beyond reason.  All of us who exist under this regime bear responsibility for it, especially those of us who benefit the most. 

This idea, that the world and everyone/everything in it exists as mere inanimate objects for humans to exploit, consume, transform, or otherwise wield power over and mangle for our own self-serving, arbitrary purposes, strikes me as perhaps the central ideology of Modernity. 

The 14th century mystic, Meister Eckhart suggests a different approach to the world, summed up in his use of the German word, Gelassenheit.  It literally means "letting be-ness."  In other words, in place of torture, domination, and violence as the governing methodology, he would have us alternatively embrace a different attitude, one of nonviolent wonder, awe, and gratitude before life and Being.  Gelassenheit accepts and celebrates things as we find them for their inherent goodness and the miracle of their very existence.  It leaves them unmolested and learns from them without deconstructing, dismantling, or dissecting them.  Gelassenheit realizes that we all live together as interdependent participants in a larger whole.  

Where Modernity made the radical move of placing humanity -- men, really -- in the role of the measurer and disposer of all things, Gelassenheit counters this by recognizing and giving thanks for beauty, meaning, and purpose in everything.  For me, this points to a loving Creator as the center and Source of being, whose Wisdom  and Spirit permeates creation, making each creature precious, miraculous, and good.

Jesus expresses this as well, appreciating lilies, foxes, sparrows, the weather, mountain, humans, and bread and wine as revealing the Creator's Presence among and within us.

Call it techism, instrumentalism, experimentalism, or some other word denoting arbitrary, cruel, exploitative, extractive manipulation, but it reveals a nihilistic impulse essentially in opposition to the Creator and creation.  Maybe we most accurately sum it up by recognizing it as a particularly virulent manifestation of Gnosticism, an ancient spiritual pathology expressing both an obsession with knowledge, and a perverse antipathy for the material world and its Maker.

Speaking practically, Gelassenheit, of course, does not mean never touching, doing, changing, fixing, or intervening with anything.  It offers the governing attitude of wonder, care, and gratitude in our approach to things.  We see for instance a nearly infinite difference between, say, killing an animal for food done with respect, thanks, humility, and consciousness of mutuality, and the unspeakable horror of wanton industrial slaughter of animals for meat.  Doing something for the profit and convenience of some humans differs widely from something approached with circumspection and awareness of the best interests of all.  The deep consciousness of our intimate connection with all other creatures under the eye of a beneficent Creator, makes an essential difference. 

Had we adopted this sense of the inherent holiness of creation as our primary consideration in our interactions with nature from the beginning of the Modern Age, had we followed Eckhart rather than mindlessly marching and flailing to the beat of morally bankrupt men like Bacon, I have no doubt that creation and humanity would enjoy far more security and happiness today. 

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Shout.

If we do not listen carefully, humbly, and respectfully to how marginalized people receive the gospel, we wander off track into our own fantasies.

An African-American Pastor friend of mine told me something interesting the other day.  Reflecting on the spiritual, "I'm Gonna Sing When the Spirit Says Sing," she noted that the next verse says "shout."  Most people assume it means an audible, verbal shout.  But in her tradition, which actually produced spirituals in the first place, "shout" actually means a dance.  In fact, many individual worshipers have their own individual "shout," a personal, physical movement they do when moved by the Spirit in worship.

If you do not participate in this tradition you will have no idea of this special meaning of the word "shout."  Indeed, the meaning could get lost altogether for new generations unfamiliar with the practice.

I immediately thought of how this illustrates the tenuous a grip we have on the meaning of words in the New Testament.  At a remove of 2000 years, how many words could have specialized meanings known only to Christian worshipers at the time?  And often for the same reason: that they constituted an oppressed, minority community that felt a need to keep a lot of their expressions of faith to themselves?  Indeed, how much of the New Testament appears in a kind of code, a network of metaphors that only insiders would get?

This occurs to me as I read a book by a particularly radical New Testament scholar named Robert M. Price.  Price and others wonder why we find so little direct criticism of Rome in early Christian writings.  We know from other sources that Pontius Pilate routinely committed heinous atrocities in maintaining Roman rule by sheer terror.  Why then do the gospels say he tried to save Jesus?  Why does Jesus serve a centurion and Peter befriend one?  Why does the text present Jesus as so apparently non-resistant to Rome?  Price and others seem to imagine the Christian movement as pro-Roman and some even think it a product of Roman propaganda!

But the Romans exacted a steep price for openly criticizing their rule, and, as a marginalized and at-risk community.  What if the early Christians consequently underplayed their resistance in their writings?  What if they found themselves in a position analogous to African-American enslaved people who had to keep what they really thought and did from the suspicious eyes of the Master and his henchmen?  What if criticism of Rome had to appear in code that only those in the community of disciples could decipher?  

We see an example of this in the story of the Gerasene demoniac, when the gospel writers refer to his possession by a "legion" of evil demons (Mark 5:9).  Ched Myers and others have pointed to this as a subtle dig at Rome, for which "legion" meant a unit of soldiers, making the deranged man a symbol for their people.  Myers outlines some of the hidden meanings in many other passages of the gospels that criticize Rome in ways that the authorities at the time might not have picked up on.

I find another example in the famous comment of the Centurion who oversaw Jesus' crucifixion who says "Truly this man was God's Son" (Mark 15:39).  We get the report of his words from the women disciples who witnessed the whole thing (Mark 15:40).  It makes more realistic sense to hear him as cynically scoffing something more like, "Sure, this loser is God's Son?" with a subtext meaning that this gruesome fate awaits all deluded fools who challenge Rome.  But the women hear the soldier saying something he did not intend, accidentally confessing Christ's true identity in the same way that the High Priest had declared that this one man should "die for the people" (John 11:50-51).  Both spoke a truth that the Church hears beneath and contrary to the intention of the clueless speakers.

People at the time would have known that the Romans did not use crucifixion for normal criminals but reserved it as a tool of terror, mainly for sedition.  This fact alone communicated all that anyone would have to know to conclude that Jesus died at the hands of Rome as a traitor and resistor to them. 

Jesus himself says flat-out that he intends that many not understand his parables (Mark 4:11-12).  And the early Church met often in secret -- like enslaved African-Americans -- to prevent exposure to their oppressors and masters, who would not like how they worshiped.  After all, they worshiped a man whom the Roman authorities executed, but who didn't stay dead, placing him and hopefully them beyond the official terror of the Empire.

The book of Revelation also sounds like an elaborate code with everything standing for and meaning metaphorically something else.  If we take that book literally, we  completely miss the point.  But to the beleagured communities of Jesus-followers to whom John wrote it, it contained a powerful message of hope and encouragement.

The insiders in African-American, or early Christian, worship did not have special, elite, exclusive, intellectual knowledge, like the privileged Romans who subverted the gospel a century or two later, whom we call Gnostics.  No, the Gnostics considered themselves superior to the simple, underclass people attracted to the Church, inventing a prohibitively complicated mythology to justify their elitist escapism.  

I wonder if safe, wealthy, powerful, and privileged people can really understand the New Testament at all.  I doubt it.  But finally in the 20th century we did began to listen to the takes of poor, marginalized, victimized, excluded, and suffering people, and heard the New Testament in ways we never imagined before.  Indeed, as the Church loses its central and established position in Western and American society, we find ourselves listening to the New Testament in different ways.  The more we lose in terms of status and position, the more we can understand Jesus and the writings of his followers.  The more we identify with the oppressed, poor, suffering people who wrote these books for each other, the more we may become slightly better at hearing and interpreting the code imbedded therein.

Beyond that, Elizabeth Schuessler Fiorenza, a feminist biblical scholar, points out that a great deal of how the early Church lived would never have made it into print at all.  The experience and insight of women largely remained invisible... which makes it all the more remarkable that the New Testament shows women participating in the Church in all kinds of ways, including support and leadership.  What appears in texts merely hints at a considerably larger presence in the community.  Frankly, only women can perceive this and talk about it.  How much of biblical scholarship over the last two millennia consists of what we now call mansplaining?  

Does the work of men like Price and others, who claim to present such enlightened, progressive, and liberating readings, fall into this category?  Do they just myopically fail to see through the eyes of the oppressed people with whom Jesus identifies and whom he calls to discipleship?  Maybe their takes on things merely rehash the usual Modernist, patriarchal line and don't give us anything really radical at all.  Maybe such faux radicalism only shores up Empire, patronizingly allowing people to imagine they make a difference when really nothing significant changes.

How can we not arrive at the conclusion that we have exhausted the usefulness of the  "sola scriptura" approach to the Bible that has characterized Protestantism from the beginning?  Remember how Paul says "the letter kills" (2 Corinthians 3:6)?  Maybe only the kind of people whom Jesus identifies in the Beatitudes have the ability to understand him and the writings about him.  Maybe they participate in the Spirit that "gives life."  Maybe only they can show us the real meaning of "shout," beyond and beneath the written text.

And the practice of Protestants to hand out Bibles to everyone, as if any one could understand and apply its message simply by reading it, regardless of their personal or social situation, now looks kind of crazy.  Why would we do that?  Unless we hear the Bible with "ears to hear," as Jesus says, we do not have the ability to understand it at all.  And to attempt to apply the Bible without such understanding often leads to all kinds of disaster.  

As it happens, I just read something by Richard Rohr that hints at this.  He -- characteristically -- uses the example of Francis of Assisi, who took on a life of poverty in imitation of Jesus, and thus identified with him and the early Christian community.  His example helped to reform the Church then, and challenges us as well.  Nothing offends Empire like when people move away from the standard temptations to wealth, admiration, and power.  Empire considers the renunciation of any of this, especially money, as at best a laughable demonstration of mental illness.  

In any case, scholars who function within the rules and restrictions of Modern historical-critical methodologies, which inherently privilege white, male practitioners, will succeed only in exploring empty and misleading rabbit holes.  They may even gain a lot of fame and influence by convincing people of their freedom and radicality.  But they will not have or know the code that we only get from actually participating in the circumstances of the life Jesus and his followers lived.  For if we do not listen carefully, humbly, and respectfully to how marginalized people receive the gospel, we wander off track into our own fantasies.

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